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Matt and Sean talk about mind over matter, demonstrating you mean what you say, and making one of the best episodes ever, in Star Trek TOS Season 3, Episode 1, "Spectre of the Gun.”
Matt and Sean talk about mind over matter, demonstrating you mean what you say, and making one of the best episodes ever, in Star Trek TOS Season 3, Episode 1, "Spectre of the Gun.”
- (00:00) - - Intro
- (09:54) - - Viewer feedback
- (15:08) - - Today's episode
- (16:30) - - This time in history
- (24:00) - - Episode discussion
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Creators and Guests
What is Trek In Time?
Join Sean and Matt as they rewatch all of Star Trek in order and in historical context.
Sean Ferrell: In today's episode of Trek in Time, we're talking about one of the best, cats out of the bag about how Sean felt about this episode. Welcome everybody, to Trek in Time, where we're taking a look at all of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. We are currently just starting season three of the original series. That's right. What started as a. Hey, Matt, do you want to do a podcast about Star Trek in which we talk about all of Star Trek? Now after. What episode number is this? 207 episodes. We've entered season three of the original series.
Matt Ferrell: I love it.
Sean Ferrell: Here we go. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I write some sci fi, I write some horror, I write some stuff for kids. With me, as always, is my brother Matt. He is that Matt behind Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. And together, the two of us, we both love Star Trek, so we've been talking about all the different permutations from Enterprise through Discovery, strange new worlds, and now here we are, season three of the original season of the original series about to touch on the 56th episode produced. The 61st aired the sixth of the third season, Spectre of the Gun. Matt, how are you today?
Matt Ferrell: I'm doing well, Sean.
Sean Ferrell: Yes, we hope everybody is doing well. I. When we started recording a little while ago, I was struggling from a migraine. Well, guess what, talking to you has helped. Look at that.
Matt Ferrell: Oh, that's nice, Sean. That's great.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, yeah. When you get a migraine, just talk to Matt for a little while and you'll feel better. So here we are. Before we get into this, we haven't done this in a while. Quick, very brief sum up of the first two seasons of the original series. This is the first time in a really long time for me where I've watched original Trek in this way.
Matt Ferrell: Me too.
Sean Ferrell: And I have some big picture thoughts.
Matt Ferrell: What are those thoughts?
Sean Ferrell: Well, especially after watching this episode, I am struck by how great Star Trek is while having so many episodes that aren't that great.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, yeah.
Sean Ferrell: Having. Having such key memories around consuming Star Trek as a kid, loving it so much, debating in my head because I thought I had to pick a side. Am I more of a fan of Star wars or of Star Trek? Because you can't be both. And I would go back and forth and it caused me, little 10 year old me, a lot of dilemma to be like, oh, which one is which one am I like? I was very much a. I was very much a Black or white. Like, you can't be both, you can't love them both.
Matt Ferrell: And Sean, your little brother, your little brother was like, I like it all.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, I was the one like, no, you must choose. Uh, so very, very strong, vivid memories about how much I love Star Trek. And as we've been watching it in this way, I find myself hitting so many moments week after week where I'm like, yeah, this is one of those moments. This is one of those key moments I love. This is a conversation between McCoy and Spock that I remember word for word. This is a look that Kirk gives at a key moment that I remember clearly from, from my childhood. But what has struck me is that those key moments are often the one bright spot or two bright spots from an entire episode where the rest of the episode is, this is really kind of out there. This is not landing in good terrain. And I think that as we enter season three, it'll be very interesting because this is the season where at this point the series really had its legs cut out from underneath it. The network was done and they were just like, you're a 10 o' clock show now on a Friday night. They had moved it to your kitty fodder during season two at 8pm and now they're throwing them to 10pm at night. So what started off as a cerebral sci fi show in season one was put into kitty fodder territory for season two and then suddenly launched into who is home and watching this for season three. And every season their budget was cut in half. So at this point we're landing now in season three squarely in, you gotta make do with what you've got territory.
Matt Ferrell: Yep.
Sean Ferrell: And it's a gem. And again, I'm revealing ahead of the conversation how I feel about this episode. A gem like this episode comes out of that. So you can get there. It's hard, but you can get there. But so much of the struggle with ratings, cost, time slot, it just feels like somehow Star Trek was just the little engine that could to make it through all of this and still land in a place where culturally it was returned to again and again is really kind of like it's lightning in a bottle. You can't just make it. You can't just say, I'm going to go make a Star Trek. You can't just do that. And so I find myself here in season three, looking at the original series in a very new way, which is one that is a little bit awe of how did you manage to come through these three years and have the staying power you did. That's the awe and also a little bit of surprise at, as an adult saying, oh, woof. There was a lot here that was like, boy, you really. Sometimes you put out some stinkers. And yet there are memorable moments in those stinkers for me. So it's a mixed bag. I'm finding myself landing in a place that I didn't quite anticipate when we set out on this path of let's watch all of it in chronological star date order. And I was like, can't wait to get to the original series. And now I'm like, this is this. Here we are.
Matt Ferrell: I'm in the same boat in the sense of. I don't think I've ever watched the original series back to back to back to back to back. Like, how we're doing. I have done that with Next Generation countless times, Sean. I could quote some of those episodes, but I've never done that with the original series. I've always watched a handful. And then time will go by, then I'll watch a different handful. Time will go by, then, oh, there's one on tv. I'll just sit here and watch it. So it's always been like that, watching a piecemeal and so seeing it together. I'm realizing a lot of my affection for the show is just nostalgia, because some of the shows are quite bad. But there's like. I think you summed it up. There's these gems. Like, even in a bad episode, there are still gems of moments that are so iconic that when you think of Star Trek, I think of those moments. But I've lost the context of the full episode or how that full episode hits, fits inside of an entire season. So looking at it as a collective mass, I've. I'm realizing now that the show is a lot more chaotic and chaotic in their quality. The quality is not consistent in a way that I didn't realize how inconsistent the quality level was. But it doesn't make me like the show any less. Yeah, it's still this wonderful. Again, you said it well. Lightning a bottle. It's like there's this wonderful spark of an idea that allows you to kind of gloss over those rough spots because I'm in love with the idea more than I am the actual execution of some of the episodes. And for me personally, I'm actually looking forward to season three, probably the most of the three seasons, just because all along it's like every week I go up to load up the Apple TV and get the list of Episodes. I'm like, well, which one are we supposed to do this week? And so I'm flipping through the episodes. I'm looking at the list.
I'm like, oh, yes, this one. But then I'll see Spock's Brain. The thumbnail for Spock's Brain. I'm like, oh, yeah, Spock's Brain. I can't wait to watch that one. It's like. And most of the ones I'm like, I'm really excited to watch are season three episodes. And I thought that was fascinating because I know that's like the. The worst season for, like, they had no money.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: And I'm. I'm really curious to see if it holds up to my memory of those episodes. And I think it might, because, like, when you have constraints on art, sometimes you get the best art, Sometimes you do. You have to get super creative in how you do your storytelling. And I don't want to spoil my opinion of today's episode, but it might be similar to yours, but it's just like a God. They had nothing and they made something.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, they did. So on now to the mailbag. We always like to visit the comments that you've left on our previous episodes. So, Matt, what did you find for us this week?
Matt Ferrell: Okay, so last week we talked about Assignment Earth, the backdoor pilot with Gary 7. And you and I were both like, woof. Actually, I was more of the woof. God, I wish they hadn't made this a Star Trek episode. I would have loved to seen the series. Like, I wish this had been a pilot that got turned into a series. I enjoyed it, but it felt so out of place to me. I don't want to say I was attacked in the comments, but there were some strong disagreements, which I completely appreciate, and I loved to see. And there's two here on the screen right now. I'm not going to read them all, but it was along the lines of they fully approved of the episode. Another one said, sad the spinoff never materialized. Could have been fun. Some people said it was their favorite episode of the original series. There was a lot of very positive comments for this episode, which I don't want to say it surprised me, but I was like, wow, okay. It was a lot of eye opening of like, yeah, I think I'm the. I'm the outsider.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, yeah, that was my take. I agree with all those takes where I was just like, I was with you and like, yeah, there's a lot here that's not working, but there's a lot here that makes my heart sing. And it didn't. It's like I didn't express that well. Like, yeah, it's like. It's. I get the fun of this. I understand it. I feel it.
Matt Ferrell: So yeah, it's like my opinion is I would have loved to seen it as a show. I I enjoyed it as a pilot. I thought it was out of place in Star Trek, but people disagree with me. On that note, Steven Schwarzkopf wrote thanks, I finally get this episode. As for backdoor pilots never working. Okay, but I will just counter with Mork in Happy Days. Quirky but developed the main characters of the mother show and I completely forgot about Mork and Mindy.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, Mork and Mindy.
Matt Ferrell: He went on and did great stuff.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah, Happy Days spawned multiple not as many as Norman Lear. The Norman Lear universe is vast, but Mork and Mindy spinning off from Happy Days is one of those wow, did Happy Days go off the rails moments. Moving from episodes where how does Richie get out of this trouble that he's gotten into by gambling in a poker game and getting in over his head with debt? Going from that to there's an alien talking to the Fonz. Anyway.
Matt Ferrell: Other comments. There were two wrong answers only and I'm going to read them both, Sean, because I love them both dearly. And the first one's from Babarudra, who also had as part of the same comment the missed opportunity for future Trek is that Assignment Earth could have been a peak at the Department of Temporal Investigations DS9, which we'll get to in a few years. Or the shudder Star Trek Enterprises Temporal Agency, which record scratch you just talked about after I wrote this just for that Babarudra wrote for wrong answers only for Star Trek. Spectre of the Gun. Kirk and the crew come across a haunted space gun just drifting around shooting people with bad vibes. Spock gets hit first and he starts crying about math. Bones runs around yelling that ghosts aren't real, and Scotty tries to fix it with a little effort as possible, but by flipping switches. Kirk decides that he must act before things get any weirder. So he rips his shirt, points his phaser and yells set phasers to boo. They fire. The ghost gun gets scared of itself and vaporizes. Out of embarrassment, Spock raises an eyebrow and pretends like none of this happened. Bones mutters about needing a vacation as he exits into the turbolift, and Kirk stares dramatically into space like he's just solved sadness. The final exterior scene shows the Enterprise as it warps off into A cloud shaped vaguely like a cowboy hat. Thank you, Bab.
Sean Ferrell: Thank you, Bab. That's amazing.
Matt Ferrell: That made me laugh for a while.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: Second one, good old fan favorite Mark Loveless coming in with his wrong answers only. This one's also really good. I enjoyed it a lot. Plot of Spectre of the Gun. Having not learned their lesson with Gary seven, Roddenberry and team come up with another backdoor pilot called Spectre of the Gun, featuring a very young Ron Howard as Jimmy 007 who is a time traveling spy dealing with a criminal syndicate living on Mars known as Spectre. Lawsuits abound and Gene Roddenberry claiming he has never heard of the James Bond franchise. The plot evolves around Jimmy trying to steal back a new space gun Spectre stole from the future, involves the Enterprise and crew, and was as predictable as you might imagine. Double O out of seven stars, four for most fans.
Sean Ferrell: Ooh. Uh.
Matt Ferrell: I love it.
Sean Ferrell: Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Babarudra. Both of those are terrific. Thank you everybody for your comments. We really do enjoy them. And please jump into the comments and let us know what you think about this conversation as well. But that noise you hear, those lights you see, Is that Sean's migraine? No, as a matter of fact, it's not. It is the Read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Matt, hold on for this one.
Matt Ferrell: As punishment for ignoring their warning and trespassing on their planet, the Melkot condemn Captain Kirk and his landing party to the losing side of a surreal recreation of the 1881 historic gunfight at the OK corral.
Sean Ferrell: That's it.
Matt Ferrell: Done.
Sean Ferrell: We've entered new terrain, folks, where The Wikipedia and IMDb descriptions are blissfully brief. Spectre of the Gun Season 3, Episode 6, originally broadcast on October 25, 1968. We have from the original cast, we have a handful of people. We have William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, we have James Doohan, and we have Walter Koenig. We also have some guest actors. We have Ron Soble as Wyatt Earp, Bonnie Beecher as Sylvia, Charles Maxwell as Virgil Earp, Rex Holman as Morgan Earp, Sam Gilman as Doc Holliday, Charles Seel as the bartender, Ed. Bill Zuckert as Sheriff Johnny Behan, Ed McCready as the barber, and Abraham Sofaer as the Melkotian voice. And what was the world like at the time of original broadcast on October 25, 1968? Well, there's a little song that was bouncing around around this time, a little ditty. I don't know if anybody's heard of it. It's called Hey Jude by the Beatles. I think that's how you pronounce it. I'm sending out a warning to our viewers right now. Get ready for Hey Jude to be the number one song for a while. And at the box office, what were people lining up to see? Well, Matt, it wasn't Guess who's Coming to Dinner. No, that's right. It was Barbarella. This was Barbarella. Queen of the Galaxy, the 1968 English language Sci fi film directed by Roger Vadim. Based on a French comic book series by Jean Claude Forest. It starred Jane Fonda as the main character, a space traveler and representative of the United Earth government sent to find a scientist who had created a weapon that could destroy humanity. This camp sci fi adventure has remained a B movie that sci fi geeks have returned to year after year after year. And it was no surprise to me as I saw this in the list as the number one movie during this week, I stumbled upon the fact that. Did you know that there is a remake that has been in the works for a number of years?
Matt Ferrell: I want you to.
Sean Ferrell: I don't know if you know young Hollywood starlets. I don't mean that in any way as a smarmy comment or tease in your direction, but if you do know young actresses, just take a guess. Can you think of somebody that you might say, I wonder if they tapped that person to be Barbarella?
Matt Ferrell: I would have no idea where to start. There's a lot of names that are popping in my head, but it's like, I don't think any of them would want to do this.
Sean Ferrell: Apparently the actress that is tied to the remake is Sydney Sweeney.
Matt Ferrell: Oh, my gosh. Okay.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah. So if Barbarella is remade. Not a bad choice, I think if you're going for like the look that Jane Fonda had at the time. And apparently the director attached to the project is Edgar Wright, so.
Matt Ferrell: No kidding. Yeah, that actually may be good.
Sean Ferrell: Key of the recent reboot. It just opened, I believe, the Running man remake. So could be interesting to see what that looks like. And on television at this time toward the middle of last season, meaning season two of Star Trek, I started really looking at the broadcast shows that were in competition directly with Star Trek. So I thought I'd revisit that for this season as we enter now season three. So here we are on the fall of 1968 and broadcast one of the shows that stood out. I won't go into depth because when we talked about it before, it was One of those shows that was just like, what is this? And why does it exist? Operation Entertainment was still being broadcast on ABC from 7:30 to 8:30 on Friday nights. This was the show that was basically USO shows in front of troops. And this, of course, is during some of the harder days of the Vietnam War. So maybe not in the best taste, but it was still being broadcast. But I wanted to focus in on a show. Matt, we've been enjoying the. Huh. I didn't know that existed of our revisit of Star Trek. So I wanted to talk a little bit about Felony Squad. That's right. Felony Squad, a show that broadcast on ABC from September 12th of 1966 to January 31st of 1969. The show focused on Sergeant Sam Stone and Detective Jim Briggs, investigators in a major crimes unit in an unidentified west coast city. If you're wondering if a Hollywood production used backdrops of Los Angeles in a show about an unnamed city, well, you'd be right. The main character, who was the veteran was teaching the younger partner the nuances of life in his new line of police work. I think it's interesting that this show was originally titled Men Against Evil and it was a soap opera. It was a soap opera.
Matt Ferrell: Oh, my God.
Sean Ferrell: And it was a program that was supposed to be broadcast two nights a week. So it's effectively. It was almost like a daytime soap moved to a nighttime broadcast twice a week. And by March, the production began to shift and they removed all the women characters. And they had a primary sponsor that was Liggett and Myers. I don't know what Liggett and Myers made, but they did not like being associated with the word evil. So the name of the program was changed from Men Against Evil to the Felony Squad. Interesting that they're like, no, we don't like being associated with evil, but we're perfectly okay with being associated with felonies. Yes.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: So it was a crime drama. So it was in the vein of Dragnet, it seems. And it had amongst the stars Howard Duff, Dennis Cole and Ben Alexander. Howard Duff, in particular is an actor that. He's a. That guy. He's been in a lot of things. So this is one of those little, you know, a little corner of history, a little TV show that bounced along for several years and who knew? So I thought that was interesting. And in the news, yes. We have the ongoing movement in October 25, 1968, which means we are days away from a presidential election that would result in Richard Nixon winning the presidency. This is. I mean, what a Fast forward for us. We went from talking about, yeah, Johnson's gonna pull out of this race and Vietnam's not going great. And the last time we talked, we were a week away from Martin Luther King Jr. being assassinated. And now the very next episode we're discussing, there's been a jump in time. And here we are. The presidential election is right around the corner. And there is at the center of the New York Times, a picture of George C. Wallace, who had held a rally at Madison Square Garden. This is a rather famous moment of what was effectively a white supremacist movement at Madison Square Garden trying to push political favor in their direction in 1968. So busy days, shall we say? That's one way to put it on. Now to our discussion about this episode, Spectre of the Gun. I've already said this gem, this great one, this, like, I. In brief, if I have to be super, super brief in describing my respect for this episode, it is. This episode looks like it was for about $25.
Matt Ferrell: Yep.
Sean Ferrell: Incomplete sets in front of a eerie red sky. Nothing looks like it's going for any sort of realism. This is an episode. This is the first episode of Star Trek, the original series that I think evokes as much of a spirit of a show like the Prisoner as this one does. There have been other episodes which have, like, elements of weirdness, but the elements of weirdness were always presented as there's a deep footprint in reality. We're trying to do hard sci fi. This one leans into this is surreal. This is. Oh, this is all in our mind. This is a game. This is play. And it literally looks like a play. So you mentioned in our summary of, like, what is Trek to us? Effectively, the limitations on creativity force creativity in a really interesting and energized way. This one, to me, as the first one that they were producing for season three when they were told, you have half as much money as you did before. This one just reeks of what do we do and how do we do it? And then this one for me, knocks it out of the park. I love this one. I love. I love the. You get the weirdest, dumbest setup of we gotta go to this planet and make friends with these aliens. The aliens have asked us not to come. Screw them. We're gonna be their friends. And forcing their way forward. And as a result, they're put on this planet for this test. And it's all you have to do is swallow that initial dumbness and then you get this really, really great story, which is A kind of surreal prisoner esque, late 60s. But is it a Twilight Zone sort of play? And I love the acting, I love the writing. I love everything about this one. So thank you for tuning in, everybody. Do you land in similar terrain? Do you watch this one with the same sense of. I just am looking forward to watching this as opposed to I need to interpret what I'm seeing so I can talk about it.
Matt Ferrell: Let me give you some context on where I'm coming from. Next Generation is my jam. And it reminded me of the episode where Riker and a few others. I think it was Worf, Data. They go into that hotel, they beam down to a planet and there's just a rotating revolving door just with nothing else. And they go through it and suddenly they're in a hotel that they can't get out of. And it's like a Twilight Zone surreal. What is going on here? They have to puzzle their way through. This reminded me of that. I'm not saying that episode is a great Next Generation episode, but I enjoy that episode. My favorite episode of all time is probably the Measure of a Man, which is people sitting in a room talking. Like nothing happens in that episode. It's Picard defending Data's right to be alive. And it's a court drama in a room. Just people talking.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: Candy catnip. Love it. Oh, my God. Yes. Dealing with heady ideas. And it's dramatic and it's riveting and it's just people talking in a room. That's it. This reminded me again of that a little bit. Because it's economical storytelling and I love economical storytelling. I love it. And that's one of the things I was saying about, like being forced with constraints. It's like if you look at some filmmakers first movies.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: They tend to be like. If you've seen the movie Bound, which is just incredible. It's. It's made by the guys who made the Matrix.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: And it is literally people in a room talking. And it is a great film. There are so many filmmakers that do these amazing things that are. Because they have no budget, so they have to be creative. Reservoir Dogs. You know what I mean? It's like constrained storytelling can be from a certain perspective.
Sean Ferrell: The Original Star wars vs All the later ones.
Matt Ferrell: Yes. When you have no limits, you get the prequels. And we all know how that went. So it's like sometimes having these constraints.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: Can be. Can be good. So it's like, I'm not going to hold this episode. My opinion of this episode is not that it's the greatest original series episode. It's not in my top five, but it'd probably be in my top 10 or 15. You know what I mean? It's in the top. I enjoyed it. I love it. This is one of those ones that whenever it's on tv, I would enjoy watching it. I love the cheapness of it. It felt very Doctor who to me. And the way that they construct the story, it makes sense for why it looks cheap. And that's creative genius. That's what I love. It's like they explain, why do they have the facades of Hollywood movie sets? Oh, it doesn't matter, because it's this weird in your head. So it's going to be piecemeal because the aliens only have certain information, so they can only render certain parts of what they know.
Sean Ferrell: So it's like, clever.
Matt Ferrell: All right, done. Okay. You've explained the cheapness away just with a little bit of a pen swipe. So it's like, I just absolutely love it. The other part of this that I always get a kick out of is not the episode itself. It's kind of like the meta. Kind of metaness of it.
You have DeForest Kelly, who played a baddie for most of his career before he became the Doctor. And he was in lots of westerns playing bad guys in Westerns. And you know who he played? He played. I think it was Morgan Earp in. He basically played the baddies that are in this episode. But now he's on the side of the good guys for the people that he killed in the previous. It's like just the metaness of this. It felt like almost like when they were probably in a writer's room thinking like, okay, we got to come up with some creative ideas. And they were like, spitballing ideas. It was like, hey, wouldn't it be funny if we did an episode of this Once Upon a Time thing? But instead of we have Deforrest Kelly.
The bad guy, we have him against the bad guys.
And it's only going to cost as much money to do because we already have the sets. We just have to put them on the soundstage.
Sean Ferrell: They didn't even put the original act.
Sean Ferrell: The Trek cast aren't even in costume for the Old West. That's the best. So it's like you're wearing your Starfleet outfit. Yeah. Everybody else is in a costume that already would have been in Paramount's closets. Like Old west costumes. Of course, we've got tons of that. Facades that look like Old west buildings of course, we've got tons of those. This probably was just a matter of making a list and having somebody wheel stuff from. In. From the props and costume department that they already had tons of.
Matt Ferrell: Yep.
Sean Ferrell: And then the guest actors in this one are.
Matt Ferrell: They're great.
Sean Ferrell: They're perfect. Like, the depiction of these, you don't get a sense that these guys are cruel to be cruel. You get a sense that there are motivations behind what they're doing that they're not revealing, that, like, they come at all of these different scenes. One of my favorite scenes in this is when you mentioned DeForest Kelly as McCoy. McCoy's gone looking and he's like, I think I know where I can get some of the equipment we need. So he goes to the local dentist. Little does he know Doc Holliday is in there. I love that scene. I love it so much because it's this whole sequence of, oh, you're a doctor, and he's excited to meet another man of medicine. And it nearly blows his face off because out comes the rifle and. And, like, you can take whatever you want and then I will see you later. And I'm going to use this. And it is such a tightly packed and energized scene. It is so good. It is so that that moment stands out. Another one that stands out for me is Kirk going and trying desperately to go in and say, like, we're not going to do anything with the Earps. And it turns into a fist fight where he has to quickly demonstrate, like, I'm not fighting back. He puts his hands, he throws the one Earp brother that he gets into a chokehold away from himself so he can say, look, you have no reason to shoot me. I am not fighting back. The confusion in the Earps at the games that they don't understand of what's being played. I love the tension that this all creates in the original crew, where you end up with them talking to each other and saying, we are trying everything we know how to do. Kirk's frustration in the saloon and his adamant response, we're going to stay right here. He is so frustrated by the circumstances that they are in. And you don't normally get a quiet episode that lets Shatner be that emphatic.
Normally, the quiet episodes he gets quiet, and in this one, his frustration is given something really good to chew on because it is not no matter what we do, we don't know how to defuse the situation. It's no matter what we do. That ticking clock tells us we're going to die at 5pm and it becomes. It's watching a fuse burn down to a stick of tnt as opposed to how do we get out of this one? It's how the hell do we get away from this one? They don't want to solve a problem, they want to get out. And what a great depiction of, like, how do you create tension in a 45 minute program? Literally pack it full of dynamite and light the fuse and see what happens. And this one does that so perfectly that it's just. For me, it's highly energized fun throughout the entire thing. And I love the, you mentioned Doctor who. I love some of the camp elements of this one where the lightning that is flashing as they're waiting for the Earps to show up and you can see their shadows on the back wall of the red sky. Like everything is so close that they could reach out and touch both the props and the back wall at the same time. It is also artificial and that's why it's great, because it's not pretending it's real and it, and it makes it work. So it's, if I keep talking, it's just gonna be me saying like, woo, woo.
Yeah, I love this one.
Matt Ferrell: The one thing I will say, the one thing that made me go, huh? Was the doctor's trying to go get his stuff, trying to do this, like, they're trying to build that like gas device thing that Spock's going to build and they're doing all this stuff and he's trying to get the chemicals. And I'm thinking, why do you think that's going to work? You all recognize this is a surreal, not real environment. It's being pulled from your heads in some fashion. Why would you think that's going to work? And that was never clearly explained to me. It was kind of like there's almost a kind of a. You could go through all this effort and then it's gonna not gonna do anything.
Sean Ferrell: I, I felt like there was in Chekhov's death, it felt like they in his dying were given all the evidence they needed that this was real enough.
Matt Ferrell: Okay.
Sean Ferrell: So the assumption for me was they're trying to play with, well, can we appeal to reason? Can we simply not go where they want us to go? Can we try to get out of town? They're trying all these different things and it's Chekhov's death that makes it like, oh, the gunpowder is real, the bullets are real, this man is dead. So the experiment then is, I agree with you from A one level up perspective. The experiment is only there so Spock can say, that should have worked and it did not. Therefore, it is not real. None of this is real. We do not need to worry about bullets. And I am certain of that because of logic. It's only there for that. But I felt like there was enough before that that I could get it. I was like, yeah, okay, you want to try and build a gas bomb? I was. I was okay with that in a.
Matt Ferrell: Way that I would have expected Spock to say something like, there's no guarantee this is going to work, but we need to try anyway. I mean, like, just even a line like that would have been like, oh, okay, you know what I mean? But the fact that nobody was voicing the idea that this might not work because rules are not here.
Sean Ferrell: I also think here it's playing a little bit with the idea of, like, they have uncertainty that it will work, which is why it doesn't.
Matt Ferrell: Oh, interesting.
Sean Ferrell: Because if they had known it would work, it would have.
Matt Ferrell: Right?
Sean Ferrell: It is one of those, like, paradoxes of the episode where it does look on the face of it, like, why are they doing this? But by doing it, they're demonstrating they already have a certain amount of doubt. So it's. It's a kind of. It's very subtle and you do kind of have to, like, just ride along with that moment. But I felt like, for me, there's enough there that I was wrestling with something similar as I was watching. I was like, oh, it's interesting that they go into it, certain it will work, but it does not. Meaning that they were not actually as certain as they claimed. Scotty is the one and Kirk is the. Kirk and Scotty are the two in the room who would have the most doubt. Scotty himself is just like, I'll go into this not knowing what to expect. They have the whole game of he takes a shot of whiskey because, oh, it's for the pain. There's not going to be any pain. Oh, you should have warned me earlier. Like, a moment like that is him. Like, I don't know what to expect out of this. I have no certainty about any of this. And Spock, I feel like there could have been a little bit more maybe of him saying, it will be interesting to see if this does work. Right? But McCoy's like, Jim, there's no reason why this shouldn't have worked. Is a little bit like, yeah, but you must have had a kernel of doubt, because otherwise it would have. So, right. It's. It's but it's fun head games for me. It's like, I enjoy.
Matt Ferrell: Oh, it's a minor nitpick.
Sean Ferrell: Like, it's like, oh, yeah, it's not even. I wouldn't even say it's a nitpick. It's just like, it's a point of conversation that I think is actually a fun way to exist, examine the show. Like, I think it gets. It gets fun when you're like, well, why does that happen? And as opposed to. We've had previous episodes of like, okay, Nazis. Like, you're gonna throw Nazis at us. And I don't even mean the original series. Enterprise did the same thing. Nazis showed up in Enterprise and we had the same conversation. We're just like, really? Like, you just. You're gonna pull Nazis out here? This is, this is a. This is an episode that does a nice job of being a moral conundrum about a time in history when historically, the actual events of that day, there were no good guys. So this episode does a really interesting thing in that they didn't have this episode be about. They went to the planet and they were put into this mind game and Nazis were on the other side. This wasn't a cut and dried. You're the good guys, you're the bad guys. This was. You're put into a circumstance where death is going to happen. But heroes, villains, yeah, like, doesn't matter. It's just a historical moment, that's all. And it makes for an interesting. It's an interesting conversation starter, this episode, I think, as opposed to some of the other ones that were ostensibly for children broadcast. Broadcast at 8pm on a Friday night for kids, not this one. So, like, I go back to, you know, our. Our typical closing jump into the comments, everybody. What did you think about this one? Did you, like, do you land? If you were to give this a grade, Matt, I give this one a solid A. Like, are you somewhere in like a B plus range?
Matt Ferrell: I'm probably an A, yeah.
Sean Ferrell: Viewers, do you agree with that? Do you think that this one lands at that end? Or are you one of those people who looks at the third season and says so much was being stripped away that you were seeing the parts and you didn't quite engage with it as much as we did? Let us know in the comments. We look forward to hearing what you have to say. Don't forget, while you're doing that, liking subscribing, sharing with your friends, all of those are great, easy ways for you to support the podcast. And while you're at it. If you want to support us more directly, you can go to trekintime.show. Click the button that says join. It allows you to not only throw some coins at our heads, but it will make you a subscriber to our spin off show Out of Time. We are delinquent in recording in Out of Time. We are going to record one not this week, but next week. So we hope you will tune in for that one. Where we will be chatting about the recent podcast Khan, which is a it's a kind of radio play around what happened to Khan and his people after they were left on Centauri Alpha 5. We hope you'll be interested in checking that out. So thank you so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.